Many types of devices, such as mobile phones, tablet devices, and other computing, communication, and entertainment devices increasingly offer more functions, applications, and features which are beneficial to a user, and can enhance one's personal time as well as work and social activities. For example, not only can a mobile phone be used for text, email, and voice communications, but may also be used for entertainment, such as to listen to music, surf the Internet, watch video content, gaming, and for photo and video imaging. Similarly, a portable tablet device may be utilized for email, browser, navigation, and other computing applications, as well as for the various entertainment and photo features. In addition to the many computing, communication, and entertainment applications that are available to a user of a mobile phone or tablet device, a seemingly unlimited number of third-party applications and features are also available for download to a device
It is common for families to be multitasking between tasks using these many types of devices such as entertainment (TV, gaming, mobile devices, etc.), school work (personal computing devices, mobile devices, etc.), and so on. Sometimes multitasking can divert concentration, take longer to complete work, or result in erroneous work output. As parents or guardians of children and teenagers, there is a desire to block time and distractions to allow children and teenagers to focus on completing homework or studying. For example, a parent wants their child or teenager to focus on solving mathematics and science homework when they come home from school rather than watching TV or playing video games. Accordingly, there is a desire for activities such as social networking, non-school work related websites, gaming related devices and applications, phone calls, text messaging, etc. to be restricted on one or more computing devices until homework is complete.
Traditionally, depending on the device type, some computing devices may provide for the ability to enable or disable parental controls. However, there are a couple of drawbacks with the traditional solutions. For example, each computing device must be configured individually with parental controls, which is time consuming. Further, the parental controls in existing solutions do not have a validation concept of task completion prior to usage. For these example parental control systems, they are largely based on configurable time restrictions that are not centrally managed across devices.